


The Things We Do for Love

by terrible_titles



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Character studies, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Romance, Suicidal Ideation, a probable AU where Jon and Martin get a somewhat happy ending, canon-typical jon self-worth issues, canon-typical martin depression, nebulous definitions of love, takes place through seasons 4 and 5, working through trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:35:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29929389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terrible_titles/pseuds/terrible_titles
Summary: Jon and Martin learn to live with themselves.Snippets from season 4 through the end of the series.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Kudos: 40





	The Things We Do for Love

The fluorescent lights in the hospital always give Martin a headache—the flickering glare, the low hum—and it isn’t like he’s supposed to be there anyway, but Peter Lukas isn’t Elias Bouchard, and he doesn’t have eyes everywhere, and so here Martin is. A shadow by a bedside. A shadow that is quickly developing a migraine. 

Outside the door, evening and meal carts are being rolled down linoleum floors, too-loud voices of too-cheerful nurses calling to their patients, the incessant beeps and whirls of incomprehensible machinery. 

The first time Martin came, he had just learned about the fates of Tim and Daisy, just had his mind and memories violated and laid bare by Elias. He sat beside Jon’s bed, looked at the still and lifeless body, and couldn’t even get a word out before he began weeping, trying to muffle the violence of his sobs with his hands. His world had fallen apart, his fragile new family obliterated in the space of a day. 

Now, he stands mute in the corner, arms crossed, collar loosened, a few wisps of slicked-back hair springing free. He tries to trace the line of connection between that Martin and this one, but can’t find the thread. Tim, Sasha, and Daisy are still dead. Basira is a haunted, stoic shell of herself. Melanie has devolved into something unrecognizable. Jon still won’t wake up. But Martin gazes at the still form and can’t find what it is he should feel. 

Nothing has changed, except him. 

*****

Martin isn’t aware that Jon’s back until Basira finally corners him in the break room. “I’ve been looking for you,” she says. “He’s awake.”

Martin feels his mouth twitch, pushes it back down into a thin line. But he can’t help but ask, “Is he… him?” The question they’ve all been whispering about—the one even Martin couldn’t avoid.

Basira shrugs. “Near as I can tell. But who knows what that means anymore?” And she raises a knowing eyebrow, glancing at the formal, distant visage Martin now cuts in his ironed suit and neat cuffs. 

Martin knows better than to take the bait. “I’m… glad he’s okay, then.” He turns to take his tea and leave. 

“He was asking about you,” Basira says. 

Martin pauses, one hand on his mug, back still turned. He blinks at the brown liquid, tries to recall what he should be feeling here. It’s like numbness has been injected into his chest; he knows something’s there, but he can’t tell what it is. 

“Was a bit baffled you weren’t around,” Basira adds. 

He could say he’s sorry, but why would Basira care? And it’s not as if he can tell Jon. So instead, he takes a breath, holds, then releases. Grabs his mug. “Take care of him, yeah?” She’s not Jon’s biggest fan, but she won’t let Melanie rip him to shreds, hopefully. Martin might have wanted to do more, once, but he can’t do that now. He has to take care of Jon—all of them, or at least the ones he has left—in his own way. He turns to Basira, his expression carefully neutral. “I really must be getting back to—”

“Lukas.” Basira’s voice is flat. 

“Yes.” Martin nods and moves past her, careful not to touch. 

*****

Jon finds there is static in his ear now, always, like the background of a tape. He used to search for them, used to suspect Elias hid them in his bedroom at night to spy on him. He ripped his box springs open looking for it, swore he could hear the static building as he clawed his way through the fabric trying to find evidence of the Eye watching him. 

He’s gotten used to the static by now, but when he watches Martin’s retreating back in the hallway, there is no static. There is complete, obliterating silence, and it’s so loud a desperation builds in Jon. 

_It was good to see you,_ Jon said. _I’m sorry, Martin said._

And then left Jon stranded, friendless.

Jon retreats to his office. 

The thing is, Jon knows about Martin’s crush on him. He’s always known, really. But things have obviously changed between them, and perhaps he was too much of a bastard, too much of a reckless monster, too much _Jonathan Sims_ after all. Jon finds it troublesome, the way Martin has slid in with Peter Lukas, but it’s not as if he ever treated Martin with much kindness. It’s just that he always thought of Martin as _his_. He never had to do anything about it because Martin was always just _there_. 

And now he isn’t. 

Jon gazes across his empty room. There is no tea on his desk, and no one has inadvertently messed up his papers while trying to organize them. No sign of Martin here. 

Melanie wants to kill him. Basira looks at him as if he’s not there. It’s as if Jonathan Sims really did die, and he’s just something inhuman that’s making use of the body. 

Jon thinks, _I miss him,_ and the static is slowly returning, and he’s not sure who he means, precisely.

*****

Jonathan cannot bring Sasha back. Or Tim—and that wound is so fresh he cannot swallow around it. But he can save Melanie from herself, and he can find Daisy; he can sacrifice a rib and haul her out of the Buried. He is done letting people die on his watch. He is the Archivist, after all. 

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he expects Martin to find out about his foolhardy plan and try to stop him. That thought slowly slides forward as he attempts to cut off his finger. When the door to his office opens, Jon finds himself holding his breath, waiting for a man much too large for his mild demeanor to strut in, stammering and angry. Instead, it’s Melanie, and she’s not a safe type of angry at all. That’s when he realizes Martin’s not coming. 

That’s when he lets the Boneturner take his ribs, and that’s when he steps into the coffin and delivers Daisy to Basira because damn it if someone in this Institute doesn’t get to be happy, even if only briefly. 

The Buried compresses all of this into something hard and sharp, and he finds himself biting his pillow that night, trying not to spiral into the people who are dead now because of him. (Because one life, one Daisy, is so far from making up for Sasha, Tim, Gerard, Leitner, his parents, his bully, _oh God,_ it won’t stop, and all those times Martin’s hand brushed his as he set a mug of tea on Jon’s table, and all those times Jon snapped at him over misfiled paperwork and general incompetency, when Martin, pale and shaking, admitted he’d lied on his resume, bracing for Jon’s dressing-down, and Jon nothing but sweet relief that he can still trust the man who gave him tea, like a dog beaten down and a master too ignorant to see anything but the pride of his mutt’s obedience). 

The next day, he finds Martin again. He sucks in all his pride, all the years of isolation, all the self-determination, lays himself bare, and says, _I miss you_. Martin says, _I’m not letting you die again._ And then Martin leaves. 

Jon clutches at the ribs which aren’t there. It’s a sharp, sucking ache. He gathers up what dignity he can, trembling, and moves on. 

*****

The second time Martin visited Jon in the hospital, he managed to speak, to say, hunched over his breathless body, “What good are we now, Jon? What did we accomplish?” He clasped a cold hand and his voice shivered with tears, but he had pretty much cried himself dry so nothing came. “I miss you,” he added, and kissed Jon’s palm and the pulseless point of his wrist. 

“Whatever wakes up,” Basira warned him, “won’t be human. Jonathan Sims is dead.” 

Martin didn’t care, didn’t want to wrap his head around how a man with no pulse could still be alive. Stranger things have happened. (Worse things have happened.) Man or monster, if Jon woke up, Martin would be there. 

“He won’t wake up,” Peter Lukas told him in that empty, cheerful tone, false sympathy falling through the holes in his words. “I know you want him to, Martin, but it’s time to face reality.” 

Martin refused to believe this. But then people began to disappear under Lukas’ watch, and Jon had been in his coma for months, and he had to wake up from the reverie of Jon’s bedside, waiting for the monster to reanimate. There was another, more immediate monster, and Martin couldn’t let anyone else die. Not on his watch. 

The Lonely takes to him easily. Martin had suspected this, but every day he is a little bit in awe of how the fog that surrounds him is thicker, more opaque than the day before. And it’s all just so simple. He doesn’t have to even try. Jon wakes up, but by then it’s too late. Martin is addicted to his purpose, and the feeling he gets when he walks away from Jon is—well, it’s really nothing at all. 

He thinks about Jon, though there is no edge to it anymore, no awkwardness, no flailing as he replays some hideous exchange where he’d said something awful and Jon stared at him like the bleeding idiot he was. But now it’s all like half-watching a movie while playing on your phone; he can’t touch the incessant heat in his cheeks, doesn’t cringe when he recalls how absolutely ridiculous one has to be to fall in love with their boss. 

_Love._

What does Martin know of love? A father who had abandoned him, a mother who couldn’t stand him. He has nothing to give to Jon, anyway, nothing but some poor imitation from a man who has never seen what it looks like. 

Sacrifice—Martin knows a bit more about that. 

*****

_They have all tried their best with me,_ Jon thinks. His grandmother, Georgie, now Martin. He was an impossible child; now he’s an impossible adult. He pushes people to their limit, and they give up. He is alone again, and that is fine, because all Jonathan Sims has ever been is alone. 

But he swears he can remember Martin’s voice somewhere, pitched high, wet, despairing. _He says you won’t come back. Prove him wrong. Prove them all wrong. Don’t leave me alone._

And he clings to those words, even if they weren’t real. (They’re real; he Knows it, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge how.) They swirl around in his head as he goes about finding statements, finding the monster inside himself that feeds by hurting others. What does it mean to be the sort of thing that can literally not live without causing someone pain? His curiosity has always overridden his care for others. (Honestly, he never thought he was capable of caring for others.) He knows all there is to know about Martin, for instance—all his fears, his trauma, his love—and what does Jon do with the knowledge, except sit with it?

_Prove them wrong. Don’t leave me alone._

_I miss you._

He is a burden, a weight for the universe to bear. He eats their fears to satiate his appetite. A boy, wandering off from a tired grandmother. A man, compelling others to give him their darkest offerings.

But before he gives in to the despair—before he becomes the monster Elias wants him to be—he will try one more thing. He saves Martin.

*****

They’re sitting on opposite ends of a tiny green couch in Daisy’s safehouse, so small they’re almost touching. Martin looks pale and wan, and Jon remembers: _I really loved you, you know._ It’s like a punch to his heart, and his breathing is shallow every time he hears Martin’s voice. 

“I found the tape,” Jon says, soft. “I didn’t know if it was a cry for help, a suicide note, or both.” 

Martin’s voice doesn’t echo now, but it’s the _memory_ of one. “Oh,” he says. “I’m not sure.” 

“Do you remember it?” Jon asks carefully. “Was it you?”

Martin nods, almost mechanically blinks. “Yes.”

Jon leans forward. He doesn’t like to touch people. He doesn’t like being touched. He reaches out his hand, though, and cups Martin’s cold cheek. The fire in the hearth hasn’t warmed him at all. Jon doesn’t like to See things when it comes to Martin, but he Looks and finds faded tendrils all around him, the last remnants of the Lonely. One swims next to where his hand lays on Martin’s cheek, and Jon brushes it aside, watches it fall and disappear in the air, and Martin chokes on a small gasp. 

Jon has been on the planet for more than three decades and destroyed most everything he’s touched. He doesn’t want to destroy Martin. But his cheek is warming underneath Jon’s hand. 

Martin raises his eyes to Jon. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I left you alone, and I’m so sorry. I just didn’t want to lose anyone anymore. I didn’t want to lose you. But I should have known that nothing I do matters. _Did_ know, by the end, in fact. Still got myself tossed into the Lonely, though.” 

Jon reaches out and cups his other cheek, brushing another tendril aside, and Martin’s eyes are filling with tears. Jon doesn’t know what to say, for once, so he leans forward and kisses him. It’s dry, chaste, and only lingers a moment. Martin is too surprised to do much more than accept it, and Jon falls closer to him, runs his hands down Martin’s arms, brushes the tendrils away there too. 

“I’m sorry,” Jon says to Martin’s wide-eyed gaze. 

“Why would you kiss me and apologize for it?” Martin asks, quick and hushed, almost like anger. 

“I—I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I’m a fool, Martin, and you matter, and losing you to Peter—to the Lonely—I couldn’t cope. I—gave my ribs to the Boneturner—and hurt people, on purpose. I don’t know what I am. Everything I’ve ever done has been wrong. I don’t want to infect you with my—wrongness.” Jon pauses, swallows, and pitched lower, adds, “I _can’t._ ”

“You’re all I have, Jon.” 

Jon cringes. “Lord, please don’t say that. That’s—that can’t be good.”

“None of this is _good_.”

Jon turns back to the fire and exhales. “Right.” 

They go to sleep together in the double bed. There is no way Martin would have fit on the tiny couch, and, after reminding Jon of all the ways Jon’s body had been broken by the Entities, Martin insists Jon not sleep there either.

Martin’s asleep fairly quickly, and Jon knows he should be exhausted, but he’s not. The lights are off, and the countryside is so much quieter than the city. He doesn’t know how anyone can sleep with all this silence. 

_I really loved you, you know._

_Who are you kidding, Jon? You don’t want to die._

When he feels the tear on his cheek, he’s surprised. How long has it been? He barely needs real food or sleep anymore, and he heals so supernaturally quick it’s likely impossible for him to die. He was sure he was not human enough to feel something so mundane as sad anymore. But his chest hitches once, and he tries to pitch the noise low so not to wake Martin. 

Jon rolls over, faces away from Martin and towards the window where a sliver of moon catches the top edge. 

He wishes he were the type of person who, when faced with hurting others to survive, could want to die. But when Martin sleepily throws an arm over Jon’s side and murmurs something comforting, Jon knows he’s absolutely not. 

*****

Martin wakes up and he’s not sure which world he’s in at first. He can feel the Lonely tugging and pulling in his mind, and he blinks away something ethereal at the edge of his vision. Sunlight pours over the burgundy quilt, and he looks to Jon’s slight body on his left and finds that Jon is looking back. He reaches over and brushes something off Martin’s shoulder, and Martin feels his vision clear. 

“Did you sleep at all?” Martin asks. Jon looks tired, and far too thin. The hollows of his cheeks—he didn’t remember those being there yesterday. “Are you hungry?”

Jon hesitates, and suddenly Martin’s stomach drops. “Oh,” he says, and then, hoping for a bit less disappointment this time, “Oh. Well, hopefully Basira will send along some old statements soon, yeah? In the meantime, I—well, I can cook eggs and bacon, if you—well, if you still eat at all?”

Martin usually sleeps like the dead, but there’s something he can only recall from last night in the faintest, most distant way, something now about Jon’s pained expression that tells him he has found a nerve and tripped over it ten or so times in this conversation. 

“I eat… food,” Jon says finally, his voice so raw Martin immediately wants to reach out and hug him. He refrains, only barely, and scuffles off instead to the kitchen. 

He gets the bacon started in the oven, and while he’s prepping the eggs, he feels Jonathan come up behind him. One hand sits flat on the small of his back, then brushes away. “Can I help?”

“Uh,” Martin says, pouring whisked eggs into the skillet, “I… don’t think…” He turns. “Why do you keep touching me like that?” 

Jon thinks for a second about playing dumb, but Jon knows that Martin knows that Jon Knows. So he doesn’t. “Remnants of the Lonely,” he says finally. “You still have them all over you.” 

“Oh.” Martin blinks. “You could have just… said.” 

“I… Yes. I could have.” They stare awkwardly at each other. Then, “I think the eggs, er, need you.”

Martin turns back to the curdling eggs and finishes them off, and they eat in relative silence. Jon doesn’t eat much, but he picks up the plates and does the dishes while Martin stokes a fire back into place in the den. 

“Well, you might as well have it out with them, yeah?” Martin says when Jon walks in. 

“The tendrils?” he says, and Martin stands in front of him, arms out, waiting for Jon to brush them off like a bit of dirt. “It’s not, ah, that easy.” 

Martin puts his hands down. He knew that, somehow. 

Jon looks away, brushes a hand scarred with burns over a cheek scarred with slivers of flesh-eating worms, and Martin feels horrible for not thinking. For Jon, eternally pursued by nightmare entities, touch has only ever been pain. He remembers the way Jon cupped his cheeks last night by the fire, remembers the warmth of them, and thinks about the sacrifice. 

“They’re Lonely,” Jon says, looking back. “The tendrils don’t just… brush off. They’re removed by…” He blushes. “Well, I’m sure you understand.” 

“I appreciate what you’ve done,” Martin says. “You don’t have to push yourself.” 

“It’s not… that, exactly.” 

Jon’s riddles are annoying, but Martin reminds himself to dial down the irritation. He decides to wait patiently instead. 

It feels like a full day and a half (but is more around two minutes) before Jon continues. “You said you loved me, in the Lonely. That you—well, that you had once, anyway.” 

And now Martin knows, and he’s stunned into realizing that he can’t come up with the answer to Jon’s unspoken question: _Do you still?_ The Lonely is still with him, and that love seemed so far away, fading while Jon was still in the coma, drifting along like wisps in the air of their infrequent meetings afterwards, a memory from someone else and some other time while the white fog was all around him. 

“I’ve only ever hurt people,” Jon continues. “Everything I do, no matter what I try, it all just hurts. And if you still love me, after I remove the Lonely… well, I don’t trust myself not to continue that trend.” His breath comes in a short gasp, shuddering. He places his hand on the side of his head. “Good Lord, Martin, none of this is fair to you. I want to—I want to help. I do. I want to… love you. But I’m scared I’m not human enough to do it right.” He chokes on a bitter laugh. “I don’t think I ever _was_.”

Martin’s lips tilt up on one side, not a particularly sincere expression. “So, you’ll just curse me to half-wander through the Lonely forever because you’re scared?”

“God. No. I hoped you’d find another way—another _someone_ … oh, fuck it.” Jon takes the two steps to Martin and reaches up, bringing his face down to kiss him. It is not dry, or hesitant, and Martin feels something sharp in his chest, something warm in his veins. He grips Jon’s face and presses closer than he thought possible, every inch of him seeking the consolation of a body inclined to be his, at least for now. 

Martin breaks away. “I still love you,” he gasps. 

And Jon, terrified, watching tendrils fall to dust around them, replies, “I love you too.” 

Martin feels like a numb limb coming back to life; pins and needles shake his core relentlessly, rolling out in waves. It feels like pain, too much to bear, feels like everything he’s ever lost slipping away all over again, but Jon is here. Jon is reaching up for him, bringing his head down to Jon’s narrow shoulder to rest there, and the fabric of Jon’s shirt is damp with Martin’s tears. 

“Shh,” Jon says. “It’s all right; you’re all right.” 

One of Martin’s hands is clenching the back of Jon’s shirt; his hands are so big there, so encompassing; he’s a lonely giant trying to fold himself small. He wants to tell Jon everything he’s thinking, but none of it is coherent, just images of his mother’s tired gaze and Tim’s tight smile, the empty space where Sasha should be—but Jon knows all this anyway.

Jon loves him. 

Jon stepped into the Lonely to find him. 

Jon’s a monster, and he loves him. 

The knowledge burns and shatters in his chest, and he sobs into Jon’s shoulder, clutching him harder. Martin doesn’t think he can cope, suddenly; he doesn’t think there’s room enough inside him for all the horror and hurt and Jon’s love too. 

“You’re right,” Martin manages, voice thick with tears. “It fucking _hurts._ ”

Jon laughs; it’s dry and sounds painful. 

*****

Jon laughs when he ends the world. He’s sure it’s not a pleasant laugh, even without Martin’s terrified face falling to his knees in front of him, shouting his name, panicked and trembling. _Don’t look outside,_ Martin says like he can protect Jon from his own damn self, from the consequences of choosing to stay alive. 

He feels something wet on his cheek, a thick liquid seeping from his eyes. When he touches it and pulls away, he finds blood. No more tears. He’s not Jon anymore. He’s the Archivist. 

Jon doesn’t speak for a long, long time. Martin wraps him up in a blanket on the couch like the wind isn’t carrying the screams of a billion people facing their worst nightmares to deliver at their master’s feet. Martin wipes away the blood on his cheeks and settles by Jon’s feet, resting his head on Jon’s knees and waiting while Jon stares blankly ahead. He is listening in to everything. There is more pain than he’d ever imagined. More ugliness, more horror, more devastation. He feasts on it. It feels so good. He wants to hate himself. He wants to die. He wants to live. 

There is no time anymore, so he doesn’t know when he finally says, “Martin.”

“Jon,” Martin replies. 

“I can’t fix this.” 

Martin turns his face into Jon’s thigh and lets out a shuddering sigh. 

*****

But he still tries. 

It’s an open secret between Martin and Jon that if they find a way to put things back to right, it will likely involve Jon’s death. Something, if they’re both honest with themselves, they should have done a while ago. 

Martin thinks about being a lonely child, wondering why his mother did not love him. Wondering how he could be better. Trying to figure out how he could work harder to earn it. 

He also thinks about Jon, who keeps choosing to love even when he knows the only love he can give is something broken and terrible. If that is monstrous, maybe they’re both too greedy for their own good. 

During the quiet moments of their journey, Jon makes sure to wrap his lanky arms around Martin and tell him he loves him, over and over, impressing it into Martin’s memory so it might never escape. 

Martin knows what he’s doing. Jon’s preparing him. He’s going to make sure Martin doesn’t slip back into the Lonely. He’s going to ensure Martin won’t be lost again, without Jon there. Jon wants to wrap up any capacity for goodness in him and shove it into Martin’s hands like a hastily-wrapped gift. 

Martin isn’t sure these things work as simply as Jon hopes it will, but he lets himself rest in Jon’s words all the same. As someone who has been deprived of affection all his life, he’ll gorge himself on love the way Jon devours fear. He can be a monster too. 

“One good thing,” Jon whispers to Martin one night. “I just want to have done one objectively good thing in all this. I know it won’t make up for all the rest, but…”

But every decision Jon’s ever made has been manipulated into something awful by forces outside his control. Martin could try to tell Jon that, make him see that it’s not his fault, but he’s just so tired and honestly not sure he even believes it himself. Or that he believes in anything at all, anymore.

So instead, Martin takes his hand and presses his forehead to Jon’s. “All right, Jon.” 

It is not lost on him that Jon believes the only good thing he could ever do is die. 

*****

It’s The Before. They don’t have much longer. 

Martin sits cross-legged on the cold floor and reminisces about how comfortable he never knew Daisy’s couch was. He’s reminiscing about a lot of things there, actually. It’s not good for him, but he can’t stop. 

Jon, who has promised Martin he would not Know things about him and usually does better than this at keeping that promise, has been speaking quietly to Basira, and now he makes his way over to Martin. “You’re all right?” he asks softly, and it’s not so much a question as a plea. 

“Oh, you know, being strung up in spider webs and threatened barely counts as a trauma anymore.” Martin’s eyes are dark on Jon’s, but Jon can see that Martin desperately wants the joke to land because if it doesn’t, it means they’re on a countdown and don’t have time for banter.

He wishes he could comfort Martin and pretend they have time to joke, but some things are more important than comfort. 

He settles in beside Martin, pushing his legs out, offering Martin his hand. He feels Martin run his thumb over the burn scars, and Jon takes a breath to say something, but Martin cuts him off. 

“If you tell me you love me, I’ll—I’ll just leave,” Martin says. “I don’t know where I’ll go. So maybe I won’t. But don’t do it. Just don’t.”

Jon flinches. “What?” he says, hoarse. 

Martin’s face twists horribly and then he begins to cry, silent tears so not to bother the others, and halted shudders as he attempts to repress the grief. He tries to hold his breath, swallow it down, but he can’t. Jon isn’t sure what to do here anymore, and so all he does is squeeze Martin’s hand in his own. It feels unsatisfying and useless, and Jon would like to give more to the only man in the world that will grieve him when he’s gone. 

So he says, “I love you, Martin.” 

And Martin hiccups another sob. 

*****

And After. 

“Jon, Jon, wake up, Jon, fuck you, fuck you, _wake up_.” Martin hisses this litany under his breath, angrier than he wants, but he is angry because for once he just wants Jon to be wrong and yet of course Martin is in a relationship with a man who is objectively never wrong about anything.

_Was_ , some villainous voice inside him he says. He _was_ in a relationship with Jon, but now Jon is lying here, still and lifeless, just as he was on that hospital bed so many months ago. But Jon had come back then. Martin had lost faith, but Jon had proven them wrong. He can do it again. 

“Martin,” Basira says from behind him, her voice gentler than he’d ever heard it. “Jon’s not—he can’t survive here, in a world without fears. Like the other avatars. There’s nothing for him to—to eat.” 

_Think, Martin, think._ His mind is racing through everything Annabelle said a few days ago. Move the fears to another universe—Jon will be who he thinks he is—who does Jon think he is?

He looks so devastatingly human right now. His face slack and quiet; the man is never quiet. A chest, somewhat caved, somewhat hollow, when he’d looked so full and powerful. A hand slightly curled, roped with burns. Martin covers it with his own. 

Martin has loved this man for far longer than he should have. He has loved him when he was nothing but a complete bastard to him. He has loved him when he was paranoid, self-destructive; when he was trying so hard to understand, to do good, only to be yanked back by his puppeteer’s strings. He loved him when he dived into the Buried for a woman who tried to execute him in the middle of a forest, when he ran into the Lonely for a man who had abandoned him when he needed him most. He loved him when he was good and when he wasn’t; when he wanted revenge and when he wanted absolution. Martin loved Jon like a bruise he couldn’t stop touching. And Jon loved Martin back. 

Jon thinks he’s a monster, but he wants to be human. The air shimmers with the remnant threads of another universe, still gaping, still breathing in all the fears.

What if it’s not that choice, though. What if it’s just—

“Jon. Jon.” Martin kneels over him, moves his free hand through Jon’s greasy bangs. “You don’t want to die, and, and—” Martin’s voice hitches— “and _neither do I._ ”

Martin clenches his fist around Jon’s, holds on tight, and all at once, he’s swept away.

*****

“Where—where are we?” Jon blinks up at a yellow sky. When there’s not an immediate answer, his gut seizes in a panic, looking around frantically. There’s no “we”; there’s no Martin; it’s just—

Martin is staring at him, knees tucked up in his chest, mouth open but no sound emerging. 

“Martin?” Jon flings himself upwards. “Martin, are you—” 

“Somewhere else,” Martin manages finally. 

And Jon looks all around him. They’re on a grassy knoll overlooking a small village he doesn’t recognize. He searches for the name in his infinite database of knowledge and comes up blank. The panic that had already started shifts into something else. The village, small houses in the center surrounded by farmland, looks like something that comes from long ago, a little, but not really because there’s also something like kids on bicycles and a round vehicle navigating the roads outside that Jon has never seen before. 

Then he thinks back and remembers Martin’s breath on his face, a cracked and wet voice, and _You don’t want to die_ , but he does, he did, he didn’t want this—

_And neither do I,_ and then he fled to the crack in the world, let himself be sucked in alongside all the other fears, and Martin was holding onto him. 

He looks up at Martin, at his boyfriend, at the person he loves, and he sees the reflection of his own fear staring back at him. 

“I—” Martin begins, and his voice is like shards of glass— “I’m sorry—”

Love is a kind of fear, Jon thinks. He doesn’t Know, but he’s pretty sure. 

Jon lunges towards him, pressing against Martin’s upturned knees so they’re uncomfortably pressed into his belly, grabbing the dirtied collar of his shirt, pulling him into a tight embrace. “It’s okay, we’re okay,” he lies, because he doesn’t know this world. He doesn’t know anything in it. They’re so far from home and they can never return. 

But when faced with a choice—monster or man—Martin chose life instead, a life with Jon, and so here they are. 

Martin knows something about love now. And he knows it’s not that different from sacrifice, after all.


End file.
